by David Fisher
Although the fact that we were often on the move made it more difficult to manage the operations, our business didn’t seem to suffer. Our organization had been well established and could continue to operate smoothly. We had secure routes, guaranteed transportation, and good distribution. And we had more customers than we could supply.
When the DEA began making more drug busts in the U.S. some people thought that meant they were defeating the cartels. But the real reason they were successful in making more intercepts was because more drugs were being sent into America. It was said that Medellín was responsible for shipping 80 percent of the cocaine in the world. For example, the DEA found a Colombian cargo plane carrying one thousand kilos hidden in cut flowers and wood products and said its value on the street was $20 million. Twenty million dollars! That was one shipment. With that amount of profit the business could never be stopped, there would always be people ready to take their chances to earn their fortune, even risking a prison term.
The big problem we had then was that we could supply more than the demand, so the price went down. From $35,000 or $40,000 a kilo it went down to $9,000. The profit was almost nothing but still the flow didn’t even slow down. So instead of paying the delivery men a fee for each kilo, it was better to give them ownership of part of the load. Transporter Tito Domínguez stockpiled his share when the cost was low. And when there was a big bust, like the cargo plane, the price went up quickly, and people like him would sell their product.
Pablo’s people were always able to make moves ahead of the U.S. government. Sometimes there were as many as eight different agencies trying to stop the drugs; besides DEA there was Customs, the Coast Guard, the local city police department, the state police, and the military. When Domínguez was caught he was charged with crimes by seven different agencies. One thing that helped us was that these agencies got to keep the equipment they seized, so instead of working together they were all in competition with each other for the publicity and the materials they could seize and own. They had airplanes and speedboats and fishing boats and cars that sometimes they sold and used their profits. But Pablo’s people continued to outsmart all of them.
Domínguez explained: “The government worked three men minimum on a speedboat pretending to be fishing. When we had a shipment arriving we had eight or nine boats in the area. We would check out every boat in the area and if a boat didn’t have any fishing equipment or looked suspicious they would radio, ‘Tito, mother-in-law’s in the driveway. How far out are you?’ I would shut down and wait until I got the word that mother-in-law had left the area.
“We had real good intelligence. When the talk of the town became that the government was doing speedboat busts we switched to sport fishermen. When we found out they were focusing on the Miami coast we moved a few hundred miles up to places like Cocoa Beach.
“I had one big house in the north and one in the south, each of them on the water with a big dock. These were ports of entry, nothing else. The drugs would go in the back door and right out the front door. These houses were just a doorway to America. They were in expensive neighborhoods because the neighbors’ houses were further away for privacy. The boats would deliver as much as one thousand kilos and be out of there in minutes. It was a system that was never stopped.”
I’m not defending the violence that happened, I’m explaining it. But the leaders of the Medellín cartel believed they had to force the government to change the extradition law and this was the path they chose. Soon all the judges were under protection, but there always was someone willing to inform on them. Until finally in December of 1986 the new Supreme Court found that because of a technicality the extradition treaty could not be enforced; the reason given was that it had been signed only by a temporary president. It was a small victory because the new president, Virgilio Barco, signed it fast, but it proved the impact that the attacks had on the judges in the country.
One thing that is important to remember is that there were good police and bad police. These police were not like the regular police in the United States, who are trained to protect the public. Some of them were not innocent at all. The police sometimes acted more like attacking soldiers than men who upheld the law. There were police who searched houses for Pablo who acted as gentlemen; they would make their search and leave. But others did crazy things. They were hard with innocent people, they stole possessions, they broke things for no reason, and they left after making threats. Or the police would go to a house at random and knock down doors, terrorizing people, and steal their belongings. It was known that even having in your possession a photograph concerning Pablo—even if you weren’t in it—had become a crime. If the soldiers or the police found such a picture in your house or your car, you could be arrested for cooperating with the criminals and your property would be taken. The girl with the beautiful legs remembers that her family burned every picture of Pablo. The searchers came to her house to search at least seven times. This was called ayananie, although they were always accompanied by a judge who made it legal. They stopped her many times in her car at roadblocks and they broke into her car while it was parked. But of course they never found anything to associate her or her family with Pablo. Their searches were so tough that when people wanted to get even with their neighbor for any reason they would call the police from public phones and tell them, “Pablo Escobar is living at this address.”
And sometimes the police killed. Our cousin Hernando Gavíria was at his farm with his family for a vacation when the corrupt police arrived looking for Pablo. Hernando did not know where Pablo was, nor was he in contact with him. But still the police started thrashing him. They hung him upside down, and covered his eyes to torture him with electricity, and they also inserted needles in his testicles, all in front of his children and wife, while threatening the children and wife if they didn’t tell them where Pablo was. He died in front of his family.
Even while this was going on, many of the police continued on our payroll. On Fridays the police would line up, some in uniform, and be given a salary. For that money they performed surveillance services. For example, after the war started between Medellín and Cali in the late 1980s, some police in both of those cities worked for the traffickers who controlled those cities. So that when a car came into Medellín with a license plate from Cali, or when strangers would check into a Medellín hotel, the Medellín police would check them out. If they were from Cali sometimes they would take them into custody and if their intentions were innocent they would be released; but if it was suspected they were in the city for a crime, instead of being taken to the police commanding officer they would be handed over to the cartel.
Pablo’s war against the police started with the murder of Diego Mapas, a friend who was one of our associates. He got the nickname Mapas, map, because he was incredible with directions. If you gave him an address, he would find it better than a map.
One afternoon Diego Mapas and two other bodyguards rented a taxi in Medellín to go to Bogotá to make a drug deal. What they didn’t know was that they had been followed from Medellín. The police pulled them over, and took Mapas, his bodyguards, and the taxi driver to a farm near Bogotá, where they were tortured the same way as our cousin Hernando, and disappeared never to be found again. And all these tortures were in order to find out where Pablo was hiding. The Colombian government offered $10 million for both Pablo and myself—dead or alive, but preferably dead.
Pablo learned what had happened from a member of the police force named Lieutenant Porras who would supply information to Pablo, because Porras did not agree with the way the police were carrying out their corrupt methods. Pablo encouraged him to denounce all the crooked cops, so Porras did go to the district attorney, and surprisingly for Porras the DA put him in jail. After a few weeks he supposedly escaped from the prison and then was killed by the police in a barricade near Boyacá. It’s not correct to think of the police in those days just as people keeping the law. Many of them were corrupt—something we know for sure.
Pablo fought the police hard. They were trying to kill him, so he killed them. They put a price on his head; he put a price on their heads. The total war started about 1988. In Medellín the police had hundreds of small stations for about three or four men called CAIs, for Centro de Atención Inmediata, and they were put in intersections all over the city. They were like guard posts or checkpoints, and they would stop traffic. The sicarios would attack these posts with machine guns or sometimes bombs. There would be money paid for the death of each policeman. The amount of payment was figured by the rank of the policeman. A regular policeman was between $1,000 and $2,500.
There were many poor people in Medellín trying to collect that money. It was a big business and sometimes different people made claims about the same shootings. So a system was set up that before the event the assassin would need to inform the head sicario where he would attack, and afterward he would have to present a newspaper story about the attack to receive his pay.
There are many, many guesses about how many policemen were killed, from about two hundred to two thousand. I don’t know the exact number. One reason for that difference was that there was violence done from so many different places. Pablo was the easiest to blame for all the deaths, but many of these assassinations were done by other police trying to get paid, as well as other people wanting to get even.
The police fought back with their own assassins. The secret police death squads would go in black cars into the poor neighborhoods, the barrios, at night. Most regular people would stay off the streets after work, so the police decided anyone on the corner was a bad guy, and that they worked for Pablo. Their secret squads with machine guns would drive around shooting young people for just standing on the corner, or they would take them away and later people would find their bodies. This was every night.
Another attack by the corrupt cops against innocent people was the following: One night they went to a nightclub called Oporto in Medellín; there they took about twenty young men from eighteen to thirty years old outside the parking lot to look for Pablo’s son. All these young men were sons of Medellín´s wealthy including some politicians. Right there on the spot they were told to lie face down, and they were massacred. The government kept quiet, and this way the police had more confidence to do their slayings. And another night at a Medellín street corner in the humble Castilla neighborhood another massacre occurred where twelve young men ranging from twelve years old to twenty-four were killed when they stood outside. All this was done by the secret police unit. The deaths kept piling up.
In a neighborhood called Aranjuez in Medellín the killing secret police unit went to a house where there were eight young men. The police took these young men in unmarked SUVs with tinted windows to the police’s Carlos Holgüin School. There these police tortured these teenagers to find out where Pablo was hiding—without success, of course, because how would they know? The next day most of these kids were found murdered, but a couple did manage to escape to tell the story.
Pablo actually wrote letters to President Cesár Gavíria and the attorney general to make public the truth that the police were killing innocent people. But the government didn’t do anything with the names of the corrupt police. I don’t know how much really they could have done to stop it, but Pablo wanted the people to know the truth. The bodies kept piling up in the streets of Medellín’s poor neighborhoods, especially over the weekends.
What was amazing was that Pablo’s mood never changed. He accepted what was happening and never panicked. He understood his fate. I remember hearing him say several times, “No drug dealer ever died of old age.” The fact is that no matter how much pressure he was feeling, no matter what had happened during the night, no matter where we were, he always acted the same and positively. He would usually get up sometime past noon, while Gustavo loved the early mornings. Pablo never saw him. So between Gustavo and Pablo they covered the entire day. Once Pablo got up he would spend his usual half hour or more brushing his teeth. That was his obsession, brushing his teeth, which were perfect. Then he would put on a new shirt; he wore a new shirt every day 365 days a year. After he wore a shirt he would donate it to someone, there was always a person who wanted a shirt of Pablo Escobar’s. When possible he would enjoy his favorite breakfast, arepas, it’s like a corn patty with scrambled eggs, chopped onions and tomatoes, and nice Colombian coffee. Pablo loved to sing and sometime in the day he would be singing songs he loved. If he wasn’t able to speak to María Victoria or his two children, his son Juan Pablo, and his daughter, Manuela, because it was too difficult or too dangerous for them, he would write poems for his little daughter and send them to her or record tapes for her to hear. I think of all the things that he lost while we were running, the only thing that truly affected him was not being with his family. He missed his family every single day.
It was while this was happening that the legend of Pablo Escobar was being built. All of the other drug traffickers had used violence in the business, all of them, but all of the publicity was focused on Pablo. In the United States and the rest of the world his name was put on the entire drug business coming from Colombia. This was good news for all the others. The concentrating on Pablo took much of the attention off the other cartels.
The media of the world made it seem like catching Pablo would end the drug trade from Colombia. Maybe what made Pablo so interesting and exciting to everyone was the fact that he couldn’t be caught. He was one of the richest men in the world, he was running a major drug organization, he was fighting wars with the government—and he was like a ghost. He was everywhere, but he was nowhere. When he was in the city the few people who knew about his presence never gave him away. The main reason for this was that the poor people of Medellín loved him and protected him. Some people were afraid of him, that’s true, but for the people with nothing he was their hero. The government had done nothing for them, the gifts of money and houses he had given them before were repaid with their loyalty.
Six
FOR MANY YEARS WE WERE CONTINUALLY ON THE MOVE, always watching the movements around us. It began with just the Colombian police and military searching for us, but eventually we were at war with the Cali cartel, with very specialized units of Colombian police created just to scour the earth for Pablo, with representatives of America’s Delta Force, and even with the Colombian paramilitaries. And yet Pablo was able to fight them all and survive.
For much of this time we stayed on farms Pablo owned, some of them on mountains with views of the city he loved, but other times we lived deep in the safety of the jungle. Only the closest friends knew where we were. When Pablo needed to see someone, a lawyer or a politician or a friend, that person was brought to him blindfolded, often by an unusual route. Even our mother did not know where we were; when Pablo wanted to see her she would be brought to a named point. I would meet her there and make her wear a pair of blackened glasses and then take her in another car to the meeting point. Once, I remember, I handed her these glasses and told her to put them on. When she did she began making faces. “What’s wrong with these glasses,” she asked. “They’re very expensive, but I can’t see anything.”
I explained, “Mommy, these aren’t for fashion. They’re for security.”
Security was always first. Pablo always bought farms on the roads miles away from our location and put his people living there. If necessary he would build houses for them. When an enemy force went by that place day or night we would be notified immediately to get ready to leave. Only once, I can remember, did the police come upon us completely unannounced—and these people never knew who they had found.
Pablo and I were staying at a farm on a road near Amagá, which is about forty miles outside Medellín. This was toward the end of our time on the run, after Pablo had decided we should be without bodyguards. The price on us was $10 million each. As Pablo said, we paid the bodyguards very well but not $10 million. For that kind of money we knew the only people we could trust were each other.
Our agreement was that we would watch out for each other; we slept at different times so one of was always alert.
It was a beautiful house surrounded by orange and apple trees and flowers; it had a swimming pool, a place of great calm. We often had barbecues outside, where we would sit and play dominoes. I became a master of that game while we stayed there for about eight months. When Pablo was buying this farm a dog bit him, so Pablo insisted the dog stay with the farm. He named it Hussein, and eventually the animal calmed down.
We were living in the house with an older married couple we had known for many years, Albertino and Ilda. The farm had been bought in their name. They were both artists, painters. In addition to living in the house, they were given a salary and all their expenses were paid. For our protection Albertino would begin a painting but leave it unfinished. The picture that was there at the moment was a beautiful farm with a small cow. The only thing to be finished was the green grass, which I could paint to look real if necessary. Pablo would wear the painter’s cap and in the morning both of us would put paint on our hands and our clothes in case the police showed up. Pablo had grown a beard and when he was splattered with paint he would look authentic, like he did his work there.
The importance of this farm was that it was near enough to Medellín for Pablo to be in contact with the attorneys negotiating a compromise with the government to do away with the extradition laws. These meetings usually took place late at night, sometimes at one A.M. When Pablo had to go to places he would wear his artist disguise and Albertino would drive. The negotiations took a long time because Pablo knew exactly what we wanted, which was for the government to change the constitution. Meanwhile, we hid.
Very early one morning the police suddenly came to the farm. It was not a raid; there was only one patrol car with two men, so I figured they were not looking for Pablo Escobar. I opened the door for them. Albertino and Ilda were having breakfast and when Ilda saw the police she slipped away to wake Pablo. In this house we had built secret stashes to hide money as well as hideouts for ourselves. Pablo moved into one of them. When the police came to the door I welcomed them. I was pretending to be a painter with the cap and the artist’s glasses. I began reaching out to shake hands, but stopped politely because, as I indicated, I did not want to get paint on them. They explained their presence. “We’re doing a search in the neighborhood because we found a body at the side of the road.” In fact, he said, they had found a head on one side of the road and a body on the other. He continued, “It happened last night. We were wondering if you saw anything weird or heard something unusual.”